[PowerBI] Use Cortana to show your PPM data

Microsofts personal assistant “Cortana” is very smart when it comes to Power BI, and showing your Project Online data in Windows 10. This post will show you how easy it is to get all your Project Online data available for natural language queries, and directly in Windows 10. Simply follow the guide and you will be able to impress you colleagues immediately after:-)

Pre-requisites:
User is logged on with O365 account to Windows 10 and has Cortana Enabled. User also has Project Online and PowerBI (free or pro).

Navigate to your Power BI main page in O365 and select “Services”

Find the Microsoft Project Online package and click “Get”

Once the report package is done deploying, navigate to the dataset “Microsoft Project” and click on “Schedule Refresh”

Set up the “Schedule Refresh” and allow Cortana to access the dataset

Navigate to the report section, create a new page and change the page format to Cortana. Give at useful name for easy search later on e.g. Cortana BI

Make a cool report from some of the many data connections included in the Out-of-the-Box package. You could also just leave it all blank as the package already contains a strong datamodel and report visualizations that will allow you to easy ask “Cortana” for some great insights

SHOWTIME!!! – you should now log out and in again on your Windows 10 machine. Once done, go to the Cortana section and write the name of the “Cortana Report Page” you made just before. Cortana should be able to show it like below – click on the report.

Cortana now loads the report 1:1 with the way you set it up in your report – beautiful right – but there is more….

Try Cortana again but this time search for something completely different e.g. “how many risks”, and notice that also plain queries will show it has results in the Microsoft Project data

When selecting the “how many risks” result, Cortana instantly shows me that my Project Online tenant has 20 risks in total. In case you wanted to learn more, just add more requirements to your search such as: “Show count of open risks by project name” or “Show count of issues by Project owner as pie chart” etc….